Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I

by Tuson, Mark

  These patterns became more obvious to him once he became a magician. As he walked around, he could see the different trees, and what kinds of magic they were best attuned to. All notions of the traditional so-called magical attributes of trees, it turned out, were descended from the truth about them: oaks are large and long-lived, and their wood is dense but open-grained; wands made from oak wood are good at focusing large amounts of power, but not fantastic at holding power for a spell that need the energies to be built up before being executed. They are good for protective magic, as are pines and hollies. He still had no patience for those types of mystics and Wiccans though; they were naïve, and they annoyed him. They thought themselves to be magicians on some level, but all they were, as far as he knew, was pretentious, groping in the dark for concepts which hadn’t availed themselves to them.

  He tripped over a root and lost his footing for a moment, nearly sending him face-first into a hawthorn, but he caught himself and stopped.

  ‘Pillock,’ he rebuked himself aloud. He didn’t much fancy having two-inch spikes driven into his eyes.

  He was bored, and it seemed to him the more bored he was, the more bored he was doomed to become. After standing around for a moment, he decided to walk back to the Guild, and possibly get something to eat. Walking around aimlessly wasn’t going to be much use as far as finding somewhere he could practice magic alone was concerned.

  As he walked back, he wondered how he might be able to come by an area large enough for his purposes. Ideally, he would have a large area that could be secluded from anywhere populated, that way any risk of being disturbed while working would be practically non-existent, as would any risk of disturbing other people. He knew of a number of ghost towns around the country, but as far as he knew they were mostly the property of the Ministry of Defence, and had been since the Second World War. There weren’t any other large areas in the country that hadn’t been settled already.

  And then he realized, just as he was approaching the entrance to the Guild: what he needed was an island, like the one he had been sent to when he had been on trial. He had learned a hell of a lot while he had been in exile there. Of course, it wouldn’t be the same if he was living there voluntarily, with the ability to bring resources in from outside, but he would still be able to do and learn a lot.

  He wondered what islands there were that would be big enough for him to set up some kind of personal base – and where he wouldn’t draw attention to his presence or activities; he wasn’t any more eager to be caught effectively stealing an island than he had been just before to take a face full of hawthorn spikes. Maybe there would be somewhere large enough that he could hide somewhere, or maybe use some kind of veil to occlude whatever he did and built there.

  Veiling was not something Peter had ever attempted on a scale larger than that of his own body, and he had never even considered anything permanent before. There were also protective spells he would have to look into, in case anything or anyone hostile found out about what he was doing there – especially Werosaians.

  But of course, he would have to actually find an island before it was actually going to be worth knowing much about hiding or protecting it. Moreover, finding an island was naturally going to involve sitting in the library looking in books. It seemed to Peter, sometimes, that there was not anything he could do, or want to do, that would not involve him looking things up in a book at some point. It was a fact of life, but it was often less frustrating to him while he was actually doing it than when he was thinking about it, either before or after. However, in each of the cases where it was what he ended up doing, the research tended to prove essential.

  He got to his room and sat down. There was always going to be more to do, or so it seemed. Though he very much looked forward to doing it. It was just the next step, and this was something Peter often reminded himself about when he was feeling like he wasn’t making any progress.

  He was in the library again this afternoon – the main library, this time – looking at maps of Britain and the surrounding small islands. It turned out that there were a huge number of islands dotted hither and yon about the mainland, but these islands were mostly either large enough to (and almost always did) support human populations, or else too small to be suitable for anything larger than a small tent and a disposable barbecue. Both kinds of island would be equally useless, which Peter found most decidedly infuriating.

  However, looking at maps as he had been recently had been doing turned out to be a welcome change to Peter. It was so different to the arcane works he had been looking at for most of the time he had been at the Guild: as far as land was concerned, there was little that could go missing or be lost in translation. As long as the land was there and the cartographer was good at his job, the land would be on the map.

  All he had to do to find an island he could quietly claim for his use was look at the maps, make notes of the islands’ sizes and whether or not they were populated. This had proven to be a far smaller task than he had expected: it only took three days, at the end of which he had found the perfect place.

  The place he had found wasn’t exactly huge, but it was large enough for him to be able to use similar magic to what was in place at the base in Scotland, and thus go unnoticed by anyone, unless they actually knew it was there.

  It was called Knifestone, and was among the Farne Islands of which Lindisfarne is the most famous. At around a third of a mile long, there wasn’t much room, but that wasn’t going to be too much of a problem. In fact, quite the opposite: it meant that Knifestone wasn’t large enough to be likely to be the home to anything. That said, not much seemed to have been written down about the island, so he didn’t actually know if there was anything really interesting about the island other than its somewhat unique name.

  The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea, to the point where he found himself becoming rather excited to go and see the place. However, creating a portal to the island, as he had done to the home in Oxford, wasn’t going to be possible; he didn’t have any pictures of the place, and he didn’t have any ideas what permanent landmarks there might be to which he could anchor that side of the portal. So, he would just have to get there the old-fashioned way, or at least part of the way.

  This would involve tooling up for a journey, which he hadn’t consciously realized he would have to do until he became suddenly aware that he had been gormlessly staring into space for almost half an hour.

  He shook his head to wake himself up. ‘C’mon, Peter,’ he told himself, ‘wake up and get your arse into gear.’

  He got up and stretched his arms above his head, relishing the feeling of the muscles pulling, and then picked up the large book of maps he had been looking through and walked it over to the shelf he had taken it from. The weight of the volume in his hands was satisfying to carry. He returned to his room and checked what he had, what he could take with him.

  There was his satchel, to which he was as attached now as ever, hanging on the back of his chair. In it were the same things he always kept in it: his wands, his two-stick, and the little bamboo flute he had made. The books he had written in while he was away in Blackpool now resided atop his table, though he hadn’t felt much of a need to read through them in some time. He picked them up, and slipped them into the bag. If he was going to set up anything like a base of his own, he wanted his books there with him. He might even need to acquire more, but that was something he wouldn’t necessarily know until the need actually arose.

  He put the satchel over his shoulder and left his room, making his way toward the refectory. It was rather early for the evening meal just yet, but there was likely to be something available to eat. Usually it would be something simple like soup, or sometimes leftovers from breakfast or lunch.

  Nothing was left over from either meal, however; only the Guild’s own version of minestrone was on offer. Not that Peter had a problem with that; all their soups were delicious, and minestrone had always been a favourite o
f his.

  The soup did its job as well as it always had, and after he finished he went to leave the refectory.

  However, he realized something just before he reached the door. He stopped and snapped his fingers.

  ‘I should tell Eddie,’ he whispered to himself.

  Not that he specifically wanted Eddie’s blessing, as far as Knifestone was concerned. He just didn’t want him thinking that he had wandered off to create mischief. The last thing he wanted was other members of the Guild finding out about the island and thinking that is was some furtive movement related to some new Werosaian outpost. That shit would be too deep to crawl out of.

  As he walked to Eddie’s office, he couldn’t help starting to feel slightly nervous. It was entirely possible that he would find himself dismissed from the office with a raised eyebrow and a wave of the hand, or that he might think Peter was up to something he didn’t want anyone to know about, or whatever else. But as far as Peter knew, he wasn’t doing anything particularly wrong. He just hoped that Eddie understood as well as he usually did.

  He knocked on the door and then opened it immediately, without waiting for Eddie to acknowledge him.

  Eddie was stood with his back to the door, apparently reading something he had just taken down from one of the shelves.

  ‘Peter, won’t you come in,’ he said. Apparently he didn’t need to be able to see the door to know who was banging on it.

  ‘Hi Eddie,’ said Peter, trying to sound as though he wasn’t about to propose stealing an island. ‘How are you?’

  Eddie put whatever it was that he had been looking at back on the shelf and turned to face Peter, looking at him deadpan. ‘Alright. You?’

  ‘Alright.’

  ‘What do you want this time?’ Eddie sat down and motioned to Peter to do the same.

  Peter sat down. ‘I’ve been thinking for a while, I should find somewhere I can practice magic in private, out of the way, in case it’s more dangerous than it looks. There’s some stuff written about in some of the books I’ve read in your library, but there’s not an awful lot there and I’d like to see what I can… extrapolate… from what little there is. For the sake of trying to understand how Werosaian magic works.’

  Eddie said nothing, instead remaining absolutely deadpan except for raising one eyebrow.

  It took a solid minute for Eddie to form an expression on his face, and as Peter waited quietly for him to say something, there was no way of telling whether whatever response he was going to give would be positive or negative.

  Eventually, however, Eddie laughed slightly. ‘“might I have a bit of earth…”’

  The reference wasn’t lost on Peter, but he continued waiting for Eddie to say something else.

  It was another minute, which almost felt like a staring contest: if Peter could keep his resolve for longer, maybe he would be told that yes, of course he must find somewhere to work, provided he did no harm.

  Eddie spoke again. ‘So… what do you want me to say?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I just want you to know what I’m doing.’

  Eddie nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Well, don’t be getting into trouble. As it’s related to your work, I’m not going to stop you.’

  ‘I’m not really intending to get into trouble.’

  ‘I know that.’

  Eddie didn’t seem too enamoured with the idea, but he seemed to recognize that Peter was being serious, maybe he was actually proposing something that would be to the eventual benefit of the Guild as a whole.

  ‘Alright,’ Eddie said. ‘But you’ll have to work things like protection out for yourself. If it goes wrong, I can’t really afford to cover for you. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. And good luck.’

  Peter left, returning to his own room. He wasn’t sure why Eddie had been so ready to allow him to go about this, especially given that there was no apparent goal toward which he was working. Maybe Eddie trusted him. But he knew that, in organizations like this, trust can only be taken so far.

  This, however, was not going to be the most productive train of thought to follow. Instead, he directed his attention to how he was going to get to Knifestone. Since he couldn’t get there directly, through a portal, he reasoned that the best way to get there would be to use a portal to get to somewhere close, possibly somewhere like Longstone, which wasn’t far away, and then either swim or raft across the half-mile or so of water that was between the two islands.

  Longstone was a good candidate for this, because of the fairly well-known lighthouse there. In turn, this meant that there was a permanent landmark to which he could anchor the outward end of the portal. That being the case, all he would need would be food and materials to take – which could be easily acquired from shops in the nearby areas of the mainland while he was there: a day-trip to the mainland to go shopping was, while not Peter’s idea of a good time, a lot easier than the notion of having to find everything in the wild, like he had to do before.

  So, he realized, he was pretty much ready. All he had to do was get himself and his tools together. He already knew the spells to protect and veil the proposed site; all he needed to find out now was how he could expand the space around the site so that he could have an above-ground, open-air training area. Which meant there would just be one more trip to the library.

  The interesting thing – at least to Peter – about looking in the library for that spell was that it was pretty much in the first place he looked. The technical details weren’t extraordinarily difficult to grasp, and once he understood the theory, he was confident in his ability to cast the spell. There were a few side-effects that he might possibly have to think about ironing out at some point, but these were mostly effects on gravity and time, due to the expansion and compression of space, and they would be almost negligible on the small scale on which he was going to be performing the spell. But it was always wise to understand where a spell may go wrong, and how to overcome any problems.

  He studied and revised into the night, until he was confident in his understanding of everything he needed to. He was tired and slightly reluctant, but he knew now would be the best time to go: he was far less likely to be noticed at two o’clock in the morning.

  So, after stopping to collect something to eat in the morning from the stores near the refectory and a tent and sleeping bag from where mission supplies were kept, he made his way to the Guild’s entrance.

  A little sloppily, because he was tired, he wove the portal, binding it to the side of the lighthouse. For a moment he thought he had got it wrong, because nothing happened, but then it opened, the sea air wafting through the tear in space. He stepped through into the darkness, unseen.

  The portal snapped shut behind him, and he paused for a moment to make double sure it was completely gone. Once he was satisfied that it was, he looked out in what he assumed to be a north-easterly direction.

  Knifestone was just barely visible, a raised shadow against the water. The sea looked calm, though he could hear it whoosh-ing slightly in the background of his hearing, a not-unpleasant sound that reminded him of the island he had been exiled to. He had forgotten how personally satisfying that time away from civilization had been.

  He paused again, this time to put some simple spells on his bags and clothes, to make them water-proof, then he stepped off the rocky side of Longstone, into the water.

  He hadn’t ever been a fantastic swimmer, but being a magician had its advantages, and so he made it across the water in just a little less than ten minutes.

  Knifestone really wasn’t a large place. A third of a mile always looks much bigger when it is seen in the context of a few streets in a populated area, but when it is seen as an island, unmarred by the influence of property development, it merely looks like an open space. Still, it was going to be big enough for his purpose.

  He jogged to the centre of the island, which took him a few minutes, and then set up the tent. After walking around it
a few times for a few minutes and tying a few spells to protect it from things like weather around it, he crouched inside and got into the sleeping bag. There was a lot to do here, but nothing was so urgent as to mean he couldn’t get some sleep first.

  Of course, trying to sleep in a tent in the middle of a small island left Peter feeling somewhat exposed, and he didn’t sleep all that well. However, when he awoke in the morning he was rested enough to be able to consider what he needed to do next.

  The main body of land on Knifestone was a grassy plateau a couple of yards above the sea, and over the water to the west he could see the lighthouse on Longstone. There wasn’t anything on here he could use for building, which meant he would have to bring everything he needed over from the mainland; food, wood, everything. But that wasn’t likely to pose too much of a problem now.

  The reason for this was that, while the biggest issue with bringing anything onto Knifestone was going to be getting portals to anchor here, anchoring here wasn’t going to be difficult now he was here. He was going to have to place a landmark of his own and force a portal anchor onto it.

  He packed the tent and sleeping bag away; neither of those were even remotely permanent enough to fulfil that purpose. He then started walking up and down, slowly pacing the length of the island.

  ‘Right,’ he said to himself. What he was thinking about, what was suggesting itself to him, was placing a stone lozenge in the ground, along the lines of the stones which can be found at the borders of old towns and cities: you are here. If he could find a large enough stone, he could bury everything except the topmost few inches; that would make a sufficiently durable – and therefore permanent – feature of the land to facilitate a portal anchor.

  He walked to the edge of the island and began walking around its circumference, looking for a large stone loose enough to be lifted out of the water. The weight of the stone wasn’t going to matter: however large or small it was, if it was going to be suitable for his purpose, it was going to be too big for him to lift out unaided, so he would have to use magic.